Quote

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

Neil Simon

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Neil Simon
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 4
Died: 2018
Died: August 26
Entrepreneur
Film Producer
Librettist
Lyricist
Playwright
Screenwriter
New York City
New York
Marvin Neil Simon
Feel
Standing
Middlemen
Feels
Hand
Pens
Writing
Greater
Stands
Like
Sound
Romantic
Force
Page
Write
Pages
Hands
Telling
May
Writers
Middleman

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He's too nervous to kill himself. He wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie.
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I don't use computers... I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.
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I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type.
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I feel like writing about a time when I was probably, and think all of us are, the happiest before the obligations start in.
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I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.
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[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.
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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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There's no such thing as a sure thing. That's why they call it gambling.
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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.
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Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
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